“Let Us Destroy It!”
He took the proclamation, held it for a moment while he looked around the circle, and then crumpled it suddenly, angrily, in his fist. Throwing it to the floor, he set his foot on it.
“I say,” he cried with flashing eyes, “let him destroy it! Better still, let us destroy it! When the enemy approaches, let us send our Boston town up in flame and fragments! Let us leave him not so much as a rivet to pick up for loot!”
There were many men there, of many minds. They had many interests to guard, and many responsibilities to bear. But for a moment he carried them with him. They waved their hands and shouted assent.
It was only for a moment. “If all thought like you!” said one, an old, grave man. “But we have 700,000 people, and they are not soldiers or philosophers. They’re human men. It is laid on us to protect them, at whatever price to our National pride. If humiliation is the price that we must pay for our past carelessness, why, gentlemen, we must pay it, bitter though it is.”
So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of twelve million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its own sea in order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to devour themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This was the United States of America, and this was the Twentieth Century—and the men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the conditions of their place and time.
They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the army could not stop the invader, they must fall.
They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out uncompromisingly, not to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were lost in the ingenious mazes of their own contriving. There was only one answer to the inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.
Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod
But here, too, there was inefficiency—inefficiency that had been cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless years. In the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or ammunition for the volunteers who came to offer their services. Although the United States government had given the States enough money annually for many years back to equip them to full war-strength; and although the militia nowhere had maintained even one-half of that strength, there were no reserves of blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of cots. Doctors who offered their services found that there was no place for them, because there were no ambulances, no field hospitals, no surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no medicines. There had not been enough for the troops that took the field, though every company had less men than even its insufficient peace strength demanded.[44]